Angel and Roxy

[x-firestar.livejournal.com]

Angel goes to meet Roxy.



Angel was smiling as she made her way through the halls to the student suites. She hadn't managed to greet the new girl quite yet and that was something she obviously needed to rectify.

She stopped in front of the closed suite door, knocking and calling, "Anybody hooooooooooome?"

Roxy barely heard the knocks over the synth version of Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' she was playing on her keytar, but her keen ears picked up one of the beats against the door and she paused. Slinging the instrument around her back by its strap, she opened the door. "Umm... just me?" she answered, looking at the redhead with a quizzical expression.

"Well luckily just you is exactly who I was looking for," Angel said brightly. "I'm Angel, hi. I'll be making sure you stay out of trouble for however long you happen to be a student here. Mind if I come in?"

"Uhh, I guess? People don't really seem to have boundaries here, do they?" Roxy asked, stepping back from the doorway and beckoning this Angel person inside.

"Really?" Angel asked, surprised. "Well...no okay yeah. No. Really they don't. I try to have boundaries if it helps. I don't always succeed but I try. But anyways! How're you settling in?"

"I'm good, thanks," Roxy answered with a polite smile. Having a feeling this wouldn't be just a quick two-minute greeting, she pulled her keytar up by its neck from around her back and unstrapped it so she could set it in its stand next to her guitar and keyboard so she could try to give Angel her full attention. "I'm Roxy."

"Good to meet you, finally." Angel tilted her head at the array of instruments in the corner. "That sounded really good. Mind I don't know music from my foot but from what I could tell it sounded awesome."

"Oh. Thanks." Roxy wrote this person off immediately, only having the barest patience for people who didn't 'know' music. "So... are you... like a teacher or something?" she asked, still confused as to why this woman was here and wondering if she could hurry her into announcing her intentions so she could end the conversation quicker.

"I'm one of the Generation X mentors." Alrighty then. Angel knew "get the hell away from me" when she saw it. She didn't let it deter her, of course. "There's me, Julian Keller, and Jess Jones. We take care of organizing events and some training exercises and what not. We've gotten a few new kids so we're trying to do the rounds to meet them."

"Generation X? Oh, that group team building thing?" Roxy hadn't given it much thought. "I wasn't really gonna do that right now. I shoot diamonds whenever something happens to me. Like, anything," she tried to elaborate. "I'm not super safe to be around." She didn't want to hurt anyone.

"It's not just about team building," Angel explained. "It's about learning to protect yourself." In this crappy, crappy world. "And about having a support system. Everything's done in a controlled environment, it's harder than you think to hurt someone, even by accident."

Roxy nodded. "Okay. Cool. I'll definitely think about it. Thanks for the info."

Angel smiled a bit, nodding. "Always happy to help if you need it. I'll let you get back to your music now though."

"I wasn't really doing anything," Roxy said with a shrug, feeling guilty now. "I was just playing with this keytar by brother gave me for my birthday. It's just... Keller already talked to me about the Gen X thing. I don't really know what else to tell you guys about it."

"Well you don't really have to tell us anything. I mostly just wanted to drop in and say hello," Angel said. "Let you know what's what. The usual welcome-y things."

"So... how long have you lived here?" Roxy asked curiously, setting the keytar aside and sitting behind the keyboard, where she toyed with the opening chords to Simon and Garfunkel's 'America.'

Angel tilted her head, listening to the music for a moment as she tried to do the math. "Since...two-thousand-six. So almost nine years. God I'm old. I was fifteen when I got here." Fifteen and a half. The half had seemed so important.

"Wow. Really? That's... that's a long time." Roxy's face fell. "It... it takes that long to learn how to control powers?"

"Oh no, definitely not," Angel assured her quickly. "Within six months of getting here and getting help I basically had things under control. I chose to stay because I got comfortable - I had great friends, and being here made me feel like I was part of something. And I like helping people. But no, it definitely won't take you ten years to learn how to control your powers. You'll meet a lot of people who came here for help controlling their powers and just decided to stay even after they'd learned."

"Huh." Roxy cocked an eyebrow, intrigued. "Well, getting comfortable's good. Being part of something. Helping people." She played almost unconsciously as she thought. "Maybe this place will be cool. But... why did you say 'had'? You 'had' great friends?"

Oops. "I mean, I still have great friends." The ones who aren't dead anyways. "I just meant at the time it was one of my justifications for staying. Now I actually have a job here so the friends aren't a justification so much as an awesome perk."

"Oh. I thought maybe you lost some friends on New Year's Eve," Roxy pointed out, putting her head down sadly.

Angel's lips twitched, smiling fading just a bit. "No, got lucky there." Her losses had all come before that. But she was pretty sure she wasn't allowed to talk about that anyways.

"That's good," Roxy nodded. "So what kind of job do you have here?"

"Working with the students, mostly. Organizing events, field trips, training sessions...stuff of the like. Like I said before, if you have any problems I'm one of the people you can come to."

That sort of thing sounded like torture to Roxy, but it was nice to know that someone liked doing it, and was doing it to benefit her. "Okay, cool. Thanks. So... can I ask what your powers are? Or is that one of those things we're not supposed to ask each other? I'm still pretty new at this."

"Totally okay to ask unless someone is obviously squirrel-y about it," Angel assured her. "My trick is fire. Making fire, controlling it...I had to carry a fire extinguisher around with me for a while, had a tendency to randomly burst into flame when I got too emotional."

"Really?! I shoot diamonds! Random bursts when I get too emotional, just like that." It was reassuring to know that someone had once been in a similar situation to her own. "But there's no fire extinguisher I can carry around," she pointed out, making a face. "How'd you learn how to stop?"

"Honestly? A lot of it is mind over matter. And I know that's a really lame, zen, monk-in-the-mountains answer, but that's pretty much how it was taught to me. Your body's got this whole new thing it can do and your mind's like 'welp I don't know what to do with this so let's just make you shoot diamonds every time you get upset.' Which sucks and is obviously really bad for living a normal life. So your mind kind of has to learn 'okay, this isn't a good situation for me to be shooting diamonds about I probably shouldn't do that.' So basically you have to re-train your brain to realize when it is and isn't a good time to shoot out diamonds. When I first manifested that involved a lot of saying to myself 'I can't burst into flames right now I can't burst into flames right now I can't burst into flames right now' over and over." She paused for a moment before adding, "It's not easy, and if you slip up you have to learn to forgive yourself for it because mistakes happen. But it's possible."

Roxy digested all of this while her hands unconsciously traveled over the keys of the keyboard. She was looking at Angel, not paying any attention to what her hands were doing while playing 'Tonight' from West Side Story. "Retraining my brain. That totally makes a lot of sense," she finally said. "And that's kinda what Mister Wilson told me, too. The zen thing, I mean. So it's not that lame. He's going to teach me meditation, and some kind of martial arts thing about redirecting... something. But I really like that stuff about retraining my brain. I'm definitely gonna try repeating 'I can't shoot diamonds right now' over and over," she smiled.

Angel grinned in return. "I'm glad it doesn't sound as lame out loud as it does in my head." She leaned back against the couch a bit, still listening to the music for a moment. It was soothing. "I can help you with the retraining stuff too if you want. A lot of it is stuff you have to do on your own, but having someone to help direct you is always helpful."

"That would be awesome," Roxy nodded. The fact that Angel didn't 'know' music would make her pretty strange to be around, but she had said she thought the keytar thing was awesome. And that was just a stupid keytar. Maybe Roxy could mold her into a proper music lover or something. "I definitely need a lot of direction."

"Direction's what I'm good at," Angel said with a nod. "I'm pretty much always around unless something's going boom, so whenever you wanna work on something just give me a holler. Doesn't have to be class hours or anything."

"Awesome!" Roxy repeated, feeling much more cheerful than she had been prior to Angel's arrival. "Maybe this place is gonna be pretty cool after all."

Angel had to smile at that. "It certainly has its moments."